This criteria was designed to emphasize what we believe to be the fundamental purpose of shoutouts, namely that they be available for anyone in the IMVU community to send friendly messages to one another and to allow developers to advertise their items or get contests going. They are not meant to be used in order to make contentious or inflammatory statements, to criticize others, to voice opinions or complaints, or to provoke credits argumentative responses. Click here for more information on this.
WHY DO SOME SHOUTOUTS THAT SEEM OKAY GET REJECTED? Shoutouts are a really fun way to make public announcements or to message people, and I would venture to say that greater than 95% of the shoutouts submitted to us get published. Most of the rejected submissions are turned away because they simply don't comply with the guidelines mentioned above, but at times, some seemingly fine shoutouts get rejected as well, and this has evoked some questions from our users about the review process.
To date, as far as rejected shoutouts go, the two major problems we have run into include:
1) Seeming inconsistencies by the review staff in credits adjudicating admissions that fall into the gray areas of acceptability. Now, when something clearly breaches the rules (ie, shoutouts that contain links to non-IMVU sites, shoutouts that contain profane language, etc) it's an easy call to make, and our reviewers have done an excellent job recently in identifying and rejecting these submissions. However, the trouble comes with the stuff that falls into the more ambiguous gray area of message content -- meaning, a submission containing a phrase or reference that may or may not be deemed unacceptable depending on how it is interpreted by the individual reviewer. If you've ever seen referees or line judges arguing over the outcome of a close play in a sports event, you can certainly understand how different reviewers in IMVU, using the exact same rules and standards, can often times come to different conclusions about the merits of a submission. Ultimately, when it comes to this kind of judgment, it's not an exact science and each reviewer has to make the call. When questions arise, we do discuss these issues and share our credits opinions, and in this way try to better understand the nuances that go into our decision-making. Hopefully, using this approach, we will continue to achieve a more uniform understanding of what should or shouldn't commonly make the cut, but this also takes time, and it doesn't change the bottom line: "it's NOT an exact science" and on a case by case basis, it's up to the individual reviewer to make the call. As a person submitting a shoutout for review, one of the best things you can do to ensure that your message or submission will be consistently accepted is to follow the guidelines for message content (see above), and don't stray into the fuzzy ambiguous gray zones.















